The best towns you can reach by train that have a serious restaurant within 90 minutes of Pisa
The regional line out of Pisa Centrale is slow in the way that suits a long lunch. North it runs along the Versilia, past pinewoods and bathing huts, with the Apuan Alps standing white behind the towns because the marble is quarried straight out of the ridge. East it follows the Arno into hills of vines and olives, where autumn means new oil, white truffle and pasta cut by hand. The houses change as you go: sandstone and marble thresholds in the north, brick and plaster and ochre in the valley, and in most of these towns the good restaurant is a short walk from the platform.
Almost everyone with a rail pass and an appetite goes to Florence. It is the right instinct, since the city holds serious kitchens and the train from Pisa takes less than an hour, but it also holds the queue for the Uffizi, the pressure of a lunch booking made weeks ahead, and prices set by demand rather than by the market. Book badly and you eat a tourist menu within sight of the Duomo.
The same line keeps going, and so do the kitchens. Chefs who trained in the cities have gone home to the coast, the marble towns and the hills above the Arno, where a dining room seats few people and the produce comes from the next valley. These are the towns on that map: reachable without a car, and each with a table the most demanding of the guides has bothered to list.
Of the 23 communes we have mapped in within 90 minutes of Pisa, 9 qualify as towns you can reach by train with a serious restaurant: we have confirmed each is reachable without a car, and each holds a restaurant listed by the most demanding of the guides. The smallest, Vicopisano, has 8,563 residents.
If you are still choosing, we have also written The best coastal towns you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Pisa and The best coastal towns that eat well within 90 minutes of Pisa.
Vicopisano
Why visit Vicopisano
Vicopisano sits at the foot of Monte Pisano where the plain of the Arno meets the hills, twenty kilometers east of Pisa. The town was a Pisan river port on the old course of the Arno until the river shifted south in the sixteenth century, leaving the walls inland.
Florence captured the town in 1407, which is what brought Brunelleschi and his engineering to a place that had until then belonged to Pisa's river trade rather than to Florentine territory. The fortress and its covered passage sit above the older watchtower and the parish church, all reachable by the lanes that climb from the walls toward the ridge of Monte Pisano.
The hills above carry the olive groves that earned the town its Città dell'Olio listing, so the same slope that gave Brunelleschi high ground to defend also gives the town its oil. What the plain lost when the Arno shifted, the hillside above supplied instead: first a port town, then a fortified inland one, and finally an agricultural one.
Osteria Vecchia Noce have been named by a guide.
What to see in Vicopisano
- Rocca del Brunelleschi. Restored fortress open to visitors, built on the slope where the walls back onto Monte Pisano.
- Torre delle Quattro Porte. Twelfth-century watchtower with four arched gates, reinforced rather than built during the Brunelleschi works, the architectural symbol of the medieval town.
- Pieve di Santa Maria. Eleventh-century Romanesque parish church holding a wooden Deposition group carved around 1200, the second oldest such carving in Italy.
How to get to Vicopisano
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 33 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June is dry and green, with the Monte Pisano olive groves at their best. September and October are the second window, cool mornings and the start of the harvest. The Festa Medievale runs the first weekend of September, three days of jousts and costumed processions inside the Brunelleschi walls. Festa Medievale falls in September.
Sarzana
Why visit Sarzana
Sarzana sits on the Magra plain at the Liguria-Tuscany border, eighty kilometers from Parma and thirteen from the sea at Portovenere. The town inherited the episcopal seat of Luni in 1204, when Pope Innocent III moved it here away from the malarial plain, and the cathedral built for that new seat still anchors the centro storico.
The walled center keeps its grid plan, with Via Mazzini and the cathedral square running through it and the Palazzo Roderio still doing duty as the town hall. Above the town, on a ridge, a second fortress with a triangular plan looks down on the plain and the older one below.
A future pope was born here in 1397. Between the hill fortress from the fourteenth century, the Renaissance rebuilding of the lower cittadella, and a cathedral that changed hands with a diocese, the town's layout reads as a record of who controlled the Magra plain and when.
Pasticceria Gemmi il Loggiato, Il Cardinale Vino e Cucina, Piccolo Ristorante and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Sarzana
- Fortezza Firmafede. The fortress replaced a medieval cittadella on the same ground. Giuliano da Sangallo's plan survives largely intact, with the bulk and angles of the walls still readable from the approach into town.
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Late Gothic Tuscan cathedral, elevated to minor basilica in 1947. A cardinal born in the town, half-brother to a native-born pope, left his mark on the later additions.
- Croce di Mastro Guglielmo. The cross hangs inside the cathedral it has occupied since the seat moved here. Signed by its maker, it is the object the town's Romanesque reputation rests on.
How to get to Sarzana
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 54 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the strongest months for the centro storico, with the Festival della Mente filling the squares at the end of August. July and August are hot on the Magra plain, often 32 to 35 degrees; the Fortezza Firmafede holds courtyard concerts in the evenings. The town stays open year-round because it is a working provincial center of 21,650 residents, with daily markets and trains to La Spezia, Pisa, and Parma. Marinella Fish Festival falls in August.
Pietrasanta
Why visit Pietrasanta
Pietrasanta sits at 14 meters at the foot of the Apuan Alps, two kilometers from the Tyrrhenian, close enough to the quarries behind it and the coast in front of it that stone and sea both shape the town. It was founded in 1255 by Luca Guiscardo da Pietrasanta on the older fortress that already stood on the hill, and it grew through the fifteenth century into the processing center for marble cut from the mountains at its back.
The centro storico, where the studi and foundries still work, sits inland; the beachfront with its pinewood park lies on the coast, a separate register of the same town, one built for stone and one for summer. Michelangelo arrived in the early 1500s to work the local stone, and Henry Moore, Joan Miró and Damien Hirst followed in the twentieth century, drawn by the same studios and foundries that cut marble for the Duomo's façade centuries earlier.
The Mariani foundry on the outskirts now casts work for sculptors who order remotely from New York and Beijing. What began as a quarry town for one church has become a place where the working of stone, not the display of it, is the thing on view.
Alex, La Martinatica, Filippo and 6 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Pietrasanta
- Duomo di San Martino. White-marble façade on the collegiate church, first documented in 1223 and enlarged in 1330 and 1387. It faces the square that still functions as the town's civic center.
- Piazza Duomo. Main square with the Marzocco column celebrating Florence's 1513 reacquisition and a statue of Grand Duke Leopold by Vincenzo Santini.
- Museo dei Bozzetti. Civic museum holding 700 plaster models and clay sketches from sculptors who have worked in the local studios since the 1960s, a record of process rather than finished work.
How to get to Pietrasanta
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 41 minutes away by road.
Our tip
May through September brings the Versilia season: Marina di Pietrasanta fills, the Versiliana festival programs concerts and theatre in the pinewood from late June, and the centro storico restaurants spread tables across Piazza Duomo. June and September are the calmer brackets. July and August push the beach to capacity and the inland piazza into evening-only rhythm.
San Miniato
Why visit San Miniato
San Miniato runs along three hills at 150 meters above the lower Arno, halfway between Pisa and Florence. In 962, Otto I of Saxony made it one of the seats of imperial administration in central Italy; in 1218 Frederick II turned it into a tax collection point, and the brick tower he built between 1217 and 1223 still rises above the town, rebuilt in 1958 after the retreating Germans mined it in 1944.
The Via Francigena passes through. The Duomo, dedicated to Sant'Assunta and Santo Genesio, holds the asymmetrical clock tower called the Matilde.
What the town is mainly known for today comes from the woods around it. San Miniato produces roughly a quarter of Tuscany's white truffles, including a tuber of over two kilos found in 1954.
The National White Truffle Exhibition, running through the last three weekends of November, has been held in Piazza del Duomo since 1969.
Papaveri e Papere, Pepenero, Antico Ristoro Le Colombaie and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in San Miniato
- Rocca di Federico II. Thirty-meter brick tower built by Frederick II between 1217 and 1223, destroyed by retreating Germans in 1944 and rebuilt in 1958.
- Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta e San Genesio. Originally Romanesque cathedral with Gothic and Renaissance additions, dedicated to two patrons, with the asymmetrical Matilde clock tower as campanile.
- Palazzo dei Vicari dell'Imperatore. Medieval palace of the imperial vicars who governed San Miniato when it was an imperial administrative seat.
How to get to San Miniato
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 49 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about San Miniato
“And then time passed, which is the part the town doesn’t tell you about, because the town only sees you on the day. The jars sat in the cupboard. We are not people who keep proper white truffle at home; almost nobody is. But we do buy black truffle now and then, and we don’t buy it on a hill behind a closed road. We buy it from a man named Marco who runs a food truck in a supermarket parking lot down on the Marina near us. He digs some of it himself and sells the rest for the farmers around him, and there is no shuttle bus.”
Read our piece on San Miniato →San Miniato | The Truffle I Couldn’t Taste
Our tip
April through June brings the long Tuscan spring, mild on the ridge with views clear to the Apennines. September and October are dry and gold, the same colors painters come for. November is the truffle month: the National White Truffle Exhibition fills Piazza del Duomo across three weekends, hotel rates double, restaurants book out weeks ahead. Fiera Mercato del Tartufo Bianco di Corazzano falls in the season.
San Giuliano Terme
Why visit San Giuliano Terme
San Giuliano Terme sits at 10 meters at the southern foot of Monte Pisano, ten kilometers north of Pisa. The name Aquae Pisanae was the ancient one for the springs that rise here, and the town's own name records the later dedication to San Giuliano rather than to Pisa, though the waters remain tied to the city below by the aqueduct that still carries them there.
The frazioni climb the slope of Monte Pisano itself, olive groves stepping up the lower ground while the plain beneath opens into the pine forests and dunes of the Parco di Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli, so the comune runs in one line from mountain ridge to coastal flat with the spa town fixed at the hinge between them. What holds the place together is water moving downhill: from the spring, through the baths where the waters were taken, along the arches to Pisa, and out across the plain toward the sea.
Locanda Sant'Agata have been named by a guide.
What to see in San Giuliano Terme
- Bagni di Pisa. The restored complex occupies the eighteenth-century Lorena baths, its rooms the ones where Byron, Shelley and Leopardi lodged while taking the waters.
- Acquedotto Mediceo. The line of arches runs from the springs of Asciano down to Pisa, parallel to the modern road, still legible as a single continuous structure across the plain.
- Monte Pisano. The granite ridge above the town, with olive groves on the lower slopes and trails leading to Rocca della Verruca.
How to get to San Giuliano Terme
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 8 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about San Giuliano Terme
“By the sea, cold hits differently. When that flat grey sky arrives, it means two things in our house: a big pot of bollito, and a thermal bath. The problem is finding one, the whole apparatus, multiple pools, the salt pool, sauna, steam room, mud, the entire game. For us, that means San Giuliano Terme, at the foot of Monte Pisano, and the Bagni di Pisa.”
Read our piece on San Giuliano Terme →Bagni di Pisa | The Tuesday Cure
Our tip
The thermal town runs year-round. Winter is the original spa season, with the warm pools welcome against the cold air off the Monte Pisano. April through June and September into October are the dry mild months for combining a spa stay with walks on Monte Pisano and the Parco di San Rossore. Sagra del Pesce falls in the season.
Camaiore
Why visit Camaiore
Camaiore stretches from the Apuan Alps to the Versilia coastline, the only Versilia commune with substantial territory in both. The town center sits at 34 meters on the alluvial plain, named Campus Maior by the Romans for a military encampment on the road from Lucca to Luni.
That name and that road explain the town's shape: a fixed inland center built around the Collegiata and the medieval grid, connected by the Via Francigena to a coast six kilometers away that the Romans never had reason to build toward. The inland town and the beach at Lido di Camaiore function as two settlements under one name, joined by the road rather than by contiguous streets, with the Apuan Alps visible from the shore as the backdrop to both.
A commune this shape, mountain territory, a Roman road town, and a beach at the end of it, holds together not because its parts resemble each other but because each has stayed distinct while remaining reachable from the others.
Il Merlo, Quinto Quarto, La Dogana and 1 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Camaiore
- Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta. Thirteenth-century parish church with a fourteenth-century bell tower, the central religious building of the inland town.
- Badia di San Pietro. The church stands alone now, a single Romanesque nave where a monastery once stood, its stone unadorned in the way that marks the Lombard-era Benedictine houses of the region.
- Lido di Camaiore. Fine sand six kilometers from the town center, with the Apuan Alps rising directly behind it, mountain and shoreline visible in the same view.
How to get to Camaiore
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 44 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Camaiore
“I watched eight old men stand up at once, and something in me quietly rearranged itself. They had been sitting at Caffè Celero on Piazza San Bernardino for most of an hour, maybe longer, doing what men over sixty do on an Italian piazza, which is nothing, but nothing done carefully and particularly.”
Read our piece on Camaiore →I Could Get Old Here
Our tip
May through September runs the Versilia season at the Lido and gives the inland town its share of light evenings. June and September are the quieter brackets: warm enough for the sea, cool enough to walk the Francigena stages without losing the morning. July and August fill the Lido with families from Lucca and Milan, parking gets tight, and the inland piazze stay calmer than the seafront.
Carrara
Why visit Carrara
Carrara sits at 80 meters in the narrow plain where the Apuan Alps drop to the Tyrrhenian. The 650-plus marble quarries in the three valleys above the town, Torano, Fantiscritti and Colonnata, have produced more marble than any other place on earth, worked since Roman times.
The white and blue-grey stone went into the Pantheon and Trajan's Column. Michelangelo first came in 1497 to find marble for his Pietà and kept returning until he opened his own quarry in the Polvaccio above Torano, still called Cava di Michelangelo.
The Duomo di Sant'Andrea, begun in the eleventh century, was the first medieval church built entirely of the local stone, with a bichrome marble façade. The city's Accademia di Belle Arti has trained sculptors since 1769 and the surrounding studi still work commissions for sculptors who never set foot in Italy.
Extra, Il Narciso, Enoteca Velia have been named by a guide.
What to see in Carrara
- Duomo di Sant'Andrea. Eleventh-century cathedral, the first medieval church built entirely of Apuan marble, with a Romanesque-Gothic bichrome façade finished in the fourteenth century.
- Cave di Marmo. Over 650 quarry sites in the Torano, Fantiscritti and Colonnata valleys, worked since Roman times and visible on cave tours from the town.
- Piazza Alberica. Sixteenth-century square built by Alberico I Cybo Malaspina inside the expanded city walls, ringed by marble façades and a central statue of Maria Beatrice d'Este.
How to get to Carrara
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 55 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Carrara
“The road that goes up to Colonnata ends at Colonnata, and you understand this only when you arrive, because the village sits on a shelf of the mountain that the road was built to reach, and there is nowhere else for the road to go. I had driven up from the coast on a Tuesday in late spring with the windows open. I had come up to eat fat.”
Read our piece on Carrara →Colonnata, Carrara, and the Marble Mines | The White Mountain And The Fat
Our tip
May through September is when the cave tours run reliably and the seafront frazione of Marina di Carrara fills with families from Lombardia and Emilia. June is the best month for the quarries: long light, stable weather, and the white-on-white-on-grey of the cuts is visible at the Fantiscritti viewpoint without the August haze. July and August add heat and tour buses, particularly at Colonnata where the lardo cellars stay cool.
Viareggio
Why visit Viareggio
Viareggio sits at sea level on the Versilia coastal plain, the largest commune on the Tuscan riviera. The first parade ran in 1873, organized by middle-class residents as a float procession down the seafront; the masked protest against tax policy that followed gave the event its character.
The mascot's colour scheme, red and white, was taken from the beach umbrellas that line the shore, a detail that ties the Carnival's invented figure back to the town's own beach culture rather than to any outside tradition. The rail link to Lucca and Florence arrived in 1890, and the city turned into a Belle Époque resort in response: the seafront was rebuilt in the ornamented style of that era over the following decades.
The Magazzini Duilio 48 along Viale Margherita, together with the promenade's other survivors, mark out where that resort-era rebuilding is still legible today. The city's two identities sit side by side on the same stretch of shore: one built by a rail-borne resort economy, the other by a homegrown winter festival that turned into the town's defining export.
Il Piccolo Principe, Lunasia, Romano and 9 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Viareggio
- Passeggiata Liberty. Three-kilometer Belle Époque seafront promenade lined with Stile Liberty villas, cafés and bath houses built between 1890 and 1925.
- Cittadella del Carnevale. Sixteen vast hangars where the papier-mâché floats are built year-round, with the Museo del Carnevale and the float-construction workshops open to visitors.
- Spiaggia di Viareggio. Ten-kilometer Bandiera Blu beach lined with the original bagni concessions of the Belle Époque, fine sand and shallow seabed.
How to get to Viareggio
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 29 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Viareggio
“The bike lane starts at the bottom of Lido di Camaiore and runs south along the coast for about eight kilometers before it hits the pier at Viareggio, and the thing it teaches you, if you ride it often enough, is that Viareggio is a city you should almost always see from the saddle of a bicycle and never, if you can help it, from the pavement. The pavement has the crowd on it. The bike lane has the city.”
Read our piece on Viareggio →Viareggio | The cat at the end of the road
Our tip
May through September runs the season. June and September are calmer than the July-August peak when the beach concessions sell out and the parking on Lungomare fills by ten. February brings Carnival weekends and the largest crowds of the year for the parades along Viale Manin and Viale Margherita; the floats run through a full Sunday route.
Lucca
Why visit Lucca
Lucca sits at 19 meters on the Serchio plain, a Roman colony from 180 BC laid out in a grid still visible in the centro storico. The current walls run four kilometers around the city, twelve meters high and thirty meters wide, built between 1513 and 1645 and never breached.
They are now a tree-lined elevated promenade circling the old city, and one of the only complete Renaissance city walls left in Italy. The Piazza dell'Anfiteatro preserves the elliptical footprint of a second-century Roman amphitheater that once held ten thousand spectators; the ring of houses follows the arena's exact shape.
The Cattedrale di San Martino holds the Volto Santo crucifix and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto. Giacomo Puccini was born here in 1858.
The town gets the Lucca Comics & Games festival every October-November, the largest comics convention in Europe at 300,000 attendees.
Antica Locanda di Sesto, Nida, All'Olivo and 8 more have been named by a guide.
What to see in Lucca
- Mura di Lucca. Four kilometers of intact sixteenth-century walls, 12 meters high and 30 meters wide, built 1513-1645, now an elevated tree-lined promenade.
- Piazza dell'Anfiteatro. Elliptical square preserving the footprint of a second-century Roman amphitheater that once seated ten thousand.
- Cattedrale di San Martino. Eleventh-century cathedral with a Romanesque-Gothic façade, the Volto Santo crucifix and Jacopo della Quercia's tomb of Ilaria del Carretto from 1406.
How to get to Lucca
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Pisa is roughly 34 minutes away by road.
✷ We have written about Lucca
“We came in through Porta Santa Maria on a Tuesday afternoon in February, with the sun low and the wind off the Apuane sharp enough to flatten Sophia's coat against her, and there was nobody there. A man in a green trench was walking a dog. Two old women were having a conversation on a bench inside the wall, slowly, in dialect, with long pauses.”
Read our piece on Lucca →Lucca | The City You Cannot Photograph
Our tip
April through June and September through October bracket the year. May is the Lucca Classica music festival and the Lucca Biennale Cartasia in even years. October-November brings Lucca Comics & Games and the centro storico fills with around 300,000 attendees; book a year ahead.
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